Contemporary Ethical Issues: A Personalist Perspective (Third Edition)

Now in a newly revised third edition, this insightful exploration of contemporary ethical issues considers a series of compelling moral problems from a personalist perspective influenced by the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray (1891-1976). In many publications spanning fifty years, most notably his Gifford Lectures titled "The Form of the Personal," Macmurray developed a robust personalism that emphasizes the primacy of persons as rational agents. In his view, self-realization is achieved in community where justice and individual rights are respected. From the background of a liberal Roman Catholic, Walter G. Jeffko utilizes key elements of Macmurray's thought in developing his own philosophical viewpoint, and he relates Macmurray's ideas to those of a wide variety of important philosophers, ethicists, and other notable thinkers, including ecologists and war theorists. 

New to this third edition is an essay on the moral treatment of civilians in war, including a rigorous critique of Michael Walzer's "supreme emergency" and the communitarianism that grounds it. 

Many recent Supreme Court decisions are evaluated, as is the threat to our democracy posed by unlimited sums of money in politics, the growing inequality of wealth and income, and the rise of political extremism on the right and its threat to women's rights. 

Jeffko brings logical precision and a lucid style to the study of ethics, blending powerful scholarship with readability.